Romanticism
"In spite of its representation of potentially diabolical and satanic powers, its historical and geographic location and its satire on extreme Calvinism, James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a
Justified Sinner proves to be a novel that a dramatises a crisis of identity, a theme which is very much a Romantic concern." Discuss.
Examination of Romantic texts provides us with only a limited and much debated degree of commonality. However despite the disparity of
Romanticism (or Romanticisms) as a movement it would be true to say that a prevalent aspect of Romantic literature that unites many different forms of the movement, is a concern with the divided self.
As the empirical Rationalism of the eighteenth century was partially subverted by the subjective metaphysical reflection in the nineteenth artists tended to examine wider issues from an introspective starting point. The idea of the divided self became a motif from Blake's
"Albion" to Byron's Manfred to Keat's musings on the disassociated nature of the Poetic Self. Some writers personified this division in distinct physical manifestations, usually a hero and his inverse doppelganger. Most famously in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the various "selves" in De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater and in the complex mirroring of major characters in James Hogg's ambiguous masterpiece Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified
Sinner.
Although critics (as Andrea Henderson in Romantic Identities) have debated the extent that Romanticism dramatises divisive crises with the psychological self , the vast majority of writing on the subject agrees that "crisis of identity" is certainly a "Romantic concern".
Hugo Donelley draws attention to the "Modernis...
... middle of paper ...
... Doubleness of Hogg's Confessions and the Tradition", Studies in Scottish Literature, Vol. 18, pp.
59-74.
Punter, D. "The dialectic of persecution" in The Literature of Terror
Volume I, 1996, Longman Group (David Punter), London and New York.
Simpson, L. James Hogg, a Critical Study, 1962, Oliver and Boyd,
Edinburgh.
Wittig, Kurt. The Scottish Tradition in Literature, 1958, Oliver and
Boyd, Edinburgh.
Wu, Duncan. "Introduction" in Romanticism: An Anthology
WEBSITES.
http://prometheus.cc.emory.edu/panels/4C/R.Incorvati.html
Incorvati, R. "Dialogue and Marginality in James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner." Prometheus Unplugged Website.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Although Hogg was writing in a pre-Freudian era the essentials of his psychodynamic theory were as pertinent in 1834 as they were in
1934.
The idea of duality permeates the literary world. Certain contradictory commonplace themes exist throughout great works, creation versus destruction, light versus dark, love versus lust, to name a few, and this trend continues in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The pivotal pair in this text however, is monotony versus individuality. The opposing entities of this pairing greatly contrast against each other in Frankenstein, but individuality proves more dominant of the two in this book.
It has been often noted that the Romantic writers of English literature were rebelling against the established positions and views of society. Most of the Romantic artists were indigenes of the well-established middle class and they were swiftly tiring of the self-serving political depredation perpetrated by the hands of the upper class. The Romantics were flouting convention, thumbing their noses and calling for radical and widespread reform not only in governmental politics, but within the politics of their own trade--creativity and art. Their myriad of works are clear evidence of this. Contumely against established society was found mostly in the poetical works of the day. However, much social commentary found its way into seemingly unlikely novels. Two such novels are Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. Both of these novels are clever repositories for social commentary and judgment.
In the late eighteenth century arose in literature a period of social, political and religious confusion, the Romantic Movement, a movement that emphasized the emotional and the personal in reaction to classical values of order and objectivity. English poets like William Blake or Percy Bysshe Shelley seen themselves with the capacity of not only write about usual life, but also of man’s ultimate fate in an uncertain world. Furthermore, they all declared their belief in the natural goodness of man and his future. Mary Shelley is a good example, since she questioned the redemption through the union of the human consciousness with the supernatural. Even though this movement was well known, none of the British writers in fact acknowledged belonging to it; “.”1 But the main theme of assignment is the narrative voice in this Romantic works. The narrator is the person chosen by the author to tell the story to the readers. Traditionally, the person who narrated the tale was the author. But this was changing; the concept of unreliable narrator was starting to get used to provide the story with an atmosphere of suspense.
Mary Shelley, with her brilliant tale of mankind's obsession with two opposing forces: creation and science, continues to draw readers with Frankenstein's many meanings and effect on society. Frankenstein has had a major influence across literature and pop culture and was one of the major contributors to a completely new genre of horror. Frankenstein is most famous for being arguably considered the first fully-realized science fiction novel. In Frankenstein, some of the main concepts behind the literary movement of Romanticism can be found. Mary Shelley was a colleague of many Romantic poets such as her husband Percy Shelley, and their friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, even though the themes within Frankenstein are darker than their brighter subjects and poems. Still, she was very influenced by Romantics and the Romantic Period, and readers can find many examples of Romanticism in this book. Some people actually argue that Frankenstein “initiates a rethinking of romantic rhetoric”1, or is a more cultured novel than the writings of other Romantics. Shelley questions and interacts with the classic Romantic tropes, causing this rethink of a novel that goes deeper into societal history than it appears. For example, the introduction of Gothic ideas to Frankenstein challenges the typical stereotyped assumptions of Romanticism, giving new meaning and context to the novel. Mary Shelley challenges Romanticism by highlighting certain aspects of the movement while questioning and interacting with the Romantic movement through her writing.
“Books are the carriers of civilization” (ThinkExist, 2010, para. 1). The first part of a quote from Barbara W. Tuchman cannot be truer. It is why students study America’s classic novels to learn about the time period. Many authors intend writing for the future, while others just write for fun. They use literary techniques that are popular to the time period, making it obvious when the pieces were written. With the history, you also get the sentiment of the writer that only the novel can give you. The result of this is a great fusion between literature and history, and has its roots since the beginning of America.
Shelley’s writing was heavily influenced by the artistic movement that emerged in the 19th century in England. One of her most popular novels, Frankenstein, features one of the key aspects of romanticism: the romantic hero. In the excerpt from this novel in Fiero’s The Humanistic Tradition Dr. Frankenstein is shown to possess the qualities of said hero. The plot of Shelly’s Frankenstein highlights the unmanageable quest of Dr. Frankenstein’s attempt to overcome the decaying effect of death. His aspirations and ultimate “failure” are what brand his character the romantic hero of the novel.
History is the story and knowledge of the past. There are individuals that are interested by history and wish to study it by learning more. It is very informative to know what has happened in the past for self-knowledge. An individual cannot be naïve to the past including but not limited to how literature came to. One can understand literature more when they understand the time period the author wrote during and the way they wrote. There are several time periods different authors have been through with each period having specific beliefs. Romanticism is the time period that interests me the most; it was a time during the eighteenth century and focused on nature along with the individual’s expression of imagination and emotion.
The term Romantic is “Term applied to music of the 19th century. Romantic music had looser and more extended forms, greater experimentation with harmony and texture, richly expressive and memorable melodies, improved musical instruments, an interest in musical nationalism, and a view of music as a moral force, in which there was a link between the artist’ inner lives and the world around them” (Burkholder, p. A16). With Romanticism, composers looked for ways to express intense emotions through their music. At this time, many people were proud of their countries and wanted to reflect their country in their music and art.
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, or more commonly known as Goya, was a Spanish Romantic artist during the late 18th and early 19th century. Goya was one of the first artists to appear in the Romantic period and is now referred to as the most influential artist of the time. For a majority of his career, Goya suffered through hearing loss, causing him to express his internal thoughts through paintings he did inside of his home. The paintings depicted many characteristics of the Romantic style with his use of intense emotions and ideas such as death and horror. These romantic aspects were especially distinguished in his most famous pieces The Third of May 1808, Saturn Devouring His Son, and Witches’ Sabbath.
Tucked away in history lies the world of piracy, too far to be fully reached, comprehended or related to. They are distance stories containing horrific facts and impossible realities. It is no secret that piracy has found a home in Western pop culture; the romance of mystery and drama seems to follow any pirate image. Historically speaking some scholars have rejected this romantic view yet, for every academic voice there exists a Jack Sparrow or Long John Silver. Conflict surrounds the truth of piracy as Historians continue to see piracy in light of historical contexts while social culture relies on the dramatized romantic view. Because of this, only when these studies and stories are brought together a new insight develops. By analyzing texts, such as the primary source The Buccaneers of America by Exquemelin, historian Marcus Rediker’s Villains of All Nations and the famous Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, romance and piracy are brought together and surprisingly developed by historians and fiction-writers alike.
Romantic writer Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein does indeed do a lot more than simply tell story, and in this case, horrify and frighten the reader. Through her careful and deliberate construction of characters as representations of certain dominant beliefs, Shelley supports a value system and way of life that challenges those that prevailed in the late eighteenth century during the ‘Age of Reason’. Thus the novel can be said to be challenging prevailant ideologies, of which the dominant society was constructed, and endorsing many of the alternative views and thoughts of the society. Shelley can be said to be influenced by her mothers early feminist views, her father’s radical challenges to society’s structure and her own, and indeed her husband’s views as Romantics. By considering these vital influences on the text, we can see that in Shelley’s construction of the meaning in Frankenstein she encourages a life led as a challenge to dominant views.
Romantic: of, characterized by, or suggestive of an idealised, sentimental, or fantastic view of reality… concerned more with feeling and emotion than with form and aesthetic qualities.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is a gothic science fiction novel written in the romantic era that focuses on the elements of life. The romantic era was sparked by the changing social environment, including the industrial revolution. It was a form of revolt against the scientific revolutions of the era by developing a form of literature that romanticize nature and giving nature godliness. This element of romanticized nature is a recurrent element in Frankenstein and is used to reflect emotions, as a place for relaxation and as foreshadowing. Frankenstein also includes various other elements of romanticism including strong emotions and interest in the common people.
Roughly from 1815 to 1910, this period of time is called the romantic period. At this period, all arts are transforming from classic arts by having greater emphasis on the qualities of remoteness and strangeness in essence. The influence of romanticism in music particularly, has shown that romantic composers value the freedom of expression, movement, passion, and endless pursuit of the unattainable fantasy and imagination. The composers of the romantic period are in search of new subject matters, more emotional and are more expressive of their feelings as they are not bounded by structural rules in classical music where order, equilibrium, control and perfection are deemed important (Dorak, 2000).
The epoch known as the Age of Reason, or the Enlightenment, was a secular intellectual movement that looked to reason as an explanation of the world. The Enlightenment began in 1687 with the publishing of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia and ended in 1789 with the French Revolution (Fiero 134). The epoch of Romanticism was a reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment. The movement of Romanticism began in 1760 and ended in 1871. Romanticism as a movement was a reaction to the Enlightenment as a cultural movement, an aesthetic style, and an attitude of mind (210).